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Oracle Beware — Google Tests Cloud-Based Database
narramissic writes "On Tuesday, the same day Google held a press event to launch its Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, the company quietly announced in its research team blog a new online database called Fusion Tables. Under the hood of Fusion Tables is data-spaces technology, which would 'allow Google to add to the conventional two-dimensional database tables a third coordinate with elements like product reviews, blog posts, Twitter messages and the like, as well as a fourth dimension of real-time updates,' according to Stephen E. Arnold, a technology and financial analyst. 'So now we have an n-cube, a four-dimensional space, and in that space we can now do new kinds of queries which create new kinds of products and new market opportunities,' said Arnold, whose research about this topic includes a study done for IDC last August. 'If you're IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, your worst nightmare is now visible.'"
How's this three dimensional stuff not just plain old OLAP?
Are you adequate?
'If you're IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, your worst nightmare is now visible.'
I didn't realize they had merged.
I'm coming out with a five-dimensional database.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
I like how the word "mdash" is in the URL.
I don't get it. Relational databases are deficient, because they need twitter posts and the FOURTH DIMENSION of being able to update and insert data?
I'm interested in how this is going to further web development and online collaboration.
It seems to be a wiki like simplified database.
"'If you're IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, your worst nightmare is now visible.'"
Like I would EVER trust a company to store my data, let alone touch it. The life's blood of my company.
Really? It probably threatens slashdot's business model more than it does corporate IT vendors. Imagine a new mash up that delivers all the content of slashdot without any of the ads nor the frequent fiddling with message filter UIs.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Twitter coordinates, n-Cubes, and four-dimensional spaces... in a cloud?
Gee... I'm glad it's not possible to die from a hype overdose.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
What company in their right mind is going to upload the crown jewels into someone else's computer?
Unless you add fifth dimensional monkeys, you just aren't cool anymore.
Looking over the actual Google blog announcement, this looks more like a case of the F article getting it all wrong. The "dimensionality" stuff is clearly not intended to be the innovation or selling point of Google's service; much less a differentiator relative to database vendors, who've had OLAP for ages.
The real selling points seem to be an easy UI, a lot of predefined public data sets available to combine and correlate with your own data, and the collaboration features.
Are you adequate?
Because it was very recent when you saw it on the front page.
I have a funny feeling Oracle, DB2, and MS SQL executives aren't exactly quivering in abject terror at the idea of a database with "a third coordinate with elements like product reviews, blog posts, Twitter messages and the like."
"Real time updates" are a new feature (and a "fourth dimension")? That's news to me... I thought batch-only updates went out with punchcards.
I'm pretty sure this Google thing has some interesting features, but I am equally sure that it has nothing to do with the buzzword-stuff from that marketing drone/"IT Consultant."
SirWired
The color in which Google posts are presented is related to the current status of Google's "do no evil" motto.
Red implifies that the google software is now on the verge of becoming self-aware and we should be getting very afraid.
Apparently this new database was the final drop. When it gets out of beta the world as we know it will seize to exist.
Have a nice day.
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
Although clouds are the hot topic right now they are nothing new. The concept as been around since the 1960s with the timesharing model. Clouds are definitely the thing of the future, and cloud security is going along with that trend. It is not that clouds can't be secured like any other network, it is that they can't be tested as easily as every other network. I mean other companies are working on cloud storage as well, the big one being EMC with Atmos. It is an intriguing concept, but get the cloud secure enough to put confidential information in it will be the deal breaker.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
One of the largest data storage company, EMC, is working on cloud computing just google EMC Atmos.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
The marketing speak and abuse of the term "dimensions" in TFS is entirely unhelpful as to what "dataspaces" are about. The pre-alpha release of Fusion Tables now available has pretty limited (though interesting) functionality; a broader picture of what "dataspaces" are about is available in this paper, which is probably more useful to the technically- (rather than marketing-) oriented crowd on Slashdot.
Of particular note, a "DataSpace Support Platform" (DSSP) is not a replacement for RDBMSs, but instead something that fits a different role and provides a common interface for data stored in heterogenous underlying storage systems, some of which could be RDBMSs. Its true that some RDBMSs do provide some features along these lines, but they aren't the principal strength of RDBMSs.
This is an awful article. Sadly it takes away from what could be a pretty useful competitor to MS Access. http://realjavasoa.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tables-vs-oracle-duh.html
Dataspaces (ignoring the hype explosion) has nothing to do with relational database or SQL bashing; it fills a different role than RDBMSs; a particular purposes of "Dataspaces" is to unify access to heterogenous collections of data, including the case where some of the underlying data is held in RDBMSs, as is apparent from the paper describing them.
The pre-alpha implementation here doesn't seem to do much of that; it requires importing fairly simple tabular data into its internal datastore, and doesn't seem to do much to unify diverse underlying datastores, but given the technology that Google says its based on, one presumes that that's the future goal of Fusion Tables, and that the current version mostly is a demonstration of some what you will be able to do on the front-end given the existence of the right back-end data. The really interesting part will come if and when they support back-end data other than stuff exported into there internal servers in CSV/XLS format, particularly, linking to externally-stored and maintained data. And, for that matter, when they can support aggregation and calculation rather than just simple filtering and joins.
shouldnt that be IBM Microsoft or Oracle, not and
one company cant be all 3
From this article, I couldn't tell, but my real interest is in how Google does massively distributed in-memory databases. That is the technology I'm most interested in. I don't really care so much about the other stuff. Is this what Google runs? Or just an academic side project?
What happens when your internet connection goes down?
Companies have dealt with this already -- for instance, often a central office will have the data, perhaps on an actual mainframe, but regardless -- branch offices connect in via VPN. No Internet, no VPN.
Better question: What happens when your power goes out? That seems to happen about as often as Internet being out -- more often, in fact, if you don't count the fact that Internet generally stops working when power does.
What happens when someone breaks in
And this is less likely in-house?
Quick question: Do you honestly believe you have a better IT department -- in particular, better security -- than Google? If so, you're either in a very small minority, or you're out of your fucking mind.
It's called outsourcing. It's not new.
The same goes for the "cloud" that google has consisting of googledocs. Why would any corporate entity (or home user?) want to rely upon internet based data storage for valuable documents?
Because it's convenient? Duh?
Oh, Google Docs can work offline, and MS Office can work online, which makes your whole argument moot. It makes me wonder if you're actually that uninformed, or if you're astroturfing.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I think they have just provided the final step for the time-cube solution to start the chain reaction that will end the earth. Ignore Cubic Math at your own peril, and of humanity.
You can't handle the truth.
for all Tables add new column("product reviews, blog posts, Twitter messages and the like");
"and in that space we can now do new kinds of queries which create new kinds of products and new market opportunities"
I'd love to see the query that creates new products and market opportunities.
True... But several remote office's losing access is different than everyone everywhere losing access because of an Internet/power failure (or perhaps a google routing problem).
Not for a sufficiently large company. You're still talking about "everyone, everywhere" losing access except for your main datacenter.
If you have a datacenter with a few hundred or thousands of users on location, at least they can still access.
True. You've also still got a few hundred or thousands of users who can't.
Also - Outsourcing? Seriously? That's worked great for everyone involved in that...
I'm not talking about pushing everything off to India.
I'm talking about the fact that if you're Wal-Mart, you're Wal-Mart, not an IT company. You focus on what it is you actually do well, and you hire someone else to handle the rest.
Here's another question: Where do your cleaning staff come from? How about food, do you go out to eat, or is everything in-house? How about legal documents -- do you have your own crack team of lawyers who work for you and only you, or do you occasionally hire a law firm? (And where's your guarantee that they'll keep your important documents safe?) How about shipping -- do you send employees on foot, or do you just use FedEx, DHL, etc?
That's the point. Most businesses, especially SMBs, do not have to do everything -- indeed, cannot do everything. If they can avoid the cost of running their own servers, having their own IT staff, and essentially reduce the internal cost of IT to keeping a few web browsers running, that's a win.
If the concern is that too many people at Google have access to your data, or that Google loses data, those are separate concerns from the common kneejerk reaction to "oh noes it's not in-house!!" But your post was about "cloud computing" in general, not Google in particular.
And there's nothing particularly new or unwise about trusting a third party with your data -- you have to anyway. The important question is who to trust, what data, what's their SLA, does it buy you anything, etc.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
In other words, Google is yet another organization jumping on the tensor mining bandwagon prior to assessing its merits and pitfalls? If they're using the same algorithms I think they're using, Google is going to have a heck of a time with the efficiency, considering the scale of their dataset. The 502 error I get when I attempt to access it isn't encouraging either.
This is a world wide, shared, annotated database with easy ways to join to other data and visualization tools built-in. Kudos to Google for implementing this.
Apart from the monetization possibilities (of which there are plenty), you can now crowdsource datagathering easier than ever before.
Also, databases can be pretty difficult to add to webpages (for consumers) because you need to know a few things about SQL etc. - it looks like this could provide structured data storage to more websites than ever before.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)